


Strangers

by Shatterpath



Series: Avengers: based on The Ultimate Fanfic Challenge [11]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst and Feels, Gen, Memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-23
Updated: 2014-10-23
Packaged: 2018-02-22 07:21:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2499413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shatterpath/pseuds/Shatterpath
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve's memories haunt him. Based on the prompt #25: Strangers</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strangers

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally the 11th chapter or Slow Burn, but I realized that it made little sense there, so I pulled it to stand on its own.

The neighbor yelled after them, her irritated voice a blur against the angular gray of the city as it warped and twisted around them like the funhouse at Coney Island. They didn't care, their boyish voices warming the cold gray.

But no matter how hard Steve ran, his breath a rattle in his chest, he could never catch Bucky. No matter how he reached into the whir of snow that tried to suffocate him, he could never reach him. The blue flash of eyes haunted him like shards of ice in his heart.

Smokey and muddy and dreary, the landscape was just trees and hedges and dirt roads turned to muck. So many days none of them could even remember where they were. The Commandos were a blur of motion, of sound, of language and scent that sometimes felt like his only tether to reality. When would he wake once more to chorus girls and cheering crowds to earn his peanuts in the monkey cage? But there was no more the drench of red, white and blue until he ached with it, just the soiled echo of it laid over the skin that too often still felt like a stranger. Brown and smoke blurred the horror of war, scratched at his brain, left too many eyes dead and empty.

She was brown, pale to dark, even those big, hawkish eyes, only the fashionable red slash of that tart mouth a burst of real color in the gloom. That red caught his eye, reeled him in, drew his focus like little else could. She was his anchor, would have been his home, even if he had kept the filth-dulled stars and stripes of him on the lands of her birth. For Peggy, he would have done about anything. But only her voice haunted him now, the details of her face and the brown of her lost to him, only her voice, calling him endlessly across time.

Time was making them strangers, the details lost, only echoes to comfort and torment him.

Some days, the very strangeness of the new world he was forced, screaming in rebirth into, was almost a blessing, drowning out the ghosts in his head.


End file.
